the boy was continually struggling with himself in silence, disliking all youthful mirth and amusement, fasting, watching and praying, and groaning over the state of his soul. At nineteen, the wish to become a minister came upon him, and he began to study hard at all spare moments; and in another year, at twenty, he went to reside with Mr. Fiske, the minister of Haddam, and in him found, for the first time, a friend to whom he could open his heart, who could understand the anxieties and longings within him, and who gave him advice to withdraw himself from the young companions whose gay spirits were uncongenial to him, and spend more time with the graver and more religious.
Whether this were good advice we do not know, but a period of terrible agony had to be struggled through. It seems plain, from comparison of different lives, that in the forms of religion which make everything depend upon the individual person’s own consciousness of the state of his heart and feelings, instead of supporting this by any outward tokens for faith to rest upon, the more humble and scrupulous spirits often undergo fearful misery before they can attain to such security of their own faith as they believe essential. Indeed, this state of wretchedness is almost deemed a necessary stage in the Christian life, like the Slough of Despond in the Pilgrim’s Progress; and with such a temperament as David Brainerd’s, the horrors of the struggle for hope were dreadful and lasted for months, before an almost physical perception of light, glory, and grace shone out upon him, although, even to the end of his life, hope and fear, spiritual joy and depression alternated, no doubt, greatly in consequence of his constant ill-health.
In 1739, in his twenty-first year, he became a student at Yale, and, between hard work and his mental self-reproach for the worldly ambition of distinction, his health broke down, hæmorrhage from the lungs set in, and he was sent home, it was supposed, only to die. He was then in a very happy frame of mind, and was almost sorry to find himself well enough to return to what he felt to be a scene of temptation. That same year, his head was entirely turned by the excitement of George Whitfield’s preaching; he was carried away by religious enthusiasm, and was in a state of indiscreet zeal, of which his better judgment afterwards repented, so that he destroyed all the portion of his journal that related to that year. Indeed, his vehemence cost him dear, for, in the heat of a discussion, he had the misfortune to say, “Mr. Whittlesey, he has no more grace than this chair I am leaning upon.” Mr. Whittlesey was one of the college tutors, and a gossiping freshman who overheard the words thought proper to report this to a meddling woman, who immediately walked off to the Rector of the college with the awful intelligence that young Brainerd said that Mr. Whittlesey had no more grace than a chair!
The Rector had not the sense to silence the silly slander; he sent for the freshman, took his evidence, and that of the young men with whom Brainerd had been conversing, and then required him to make public confession and amends to Mr. Whittlesey before the whole assembled college—a humiliation never previously required, except in cases of gross moral misconduct. The fact was, that the old-fashioned hereditary Presbyterianism, which had had time to slacken in the hundred years since the foundation of the colony, was dismayed at the new and vivid life imported by Whitfield from the Wesleyan revival in the English Church. It was what always happens. A mixture of genuine sober-minded dread of extravagance, or new doctrine, and a sluggish distaste to the more searching religion, combine to lead to a spirit of persecution. This was the true reason that the lad’s youthful rashness of speech was treated as so grave an offence. Brainerd’s spirit was up. Probably he saw no cause to alter his opinion as to Mr. Whittlesey’s amount of grace, and he stoutly refused to retract his words, whereupon he was found guilty of insubordination, and actually expelled from Yale. A council of ministers who assembled at Hartford petitioned for his restoration, but were refused, the authorities deeming themselves well rid of a dangerous fanatic.
Still, as a youth of blameless life and ardent piety, he was encouraged by his friends to continue his preparation for the ministry, and he persisted in reading hard, and going out between whiles to meditate in the depths of the glorious woods. It is curious that while his homely and rigid system precluded any conscious admiration of the beauties of nature, it is always evident from his journal that the lightenings of hope and joy which relieved his too frequent depression and melancholy, were connected with the scenery and the glories of day and night. Sunrise and the aurora borealis seem to have filled him with spiritual bliss, and he never was so happy as when deep in the woods, out of the sight of men; but his morbid, sensitive, excitable nature never seems to have been understood by himself or by others.
Just as John Eliot’s missionary zeal was the outcome of the earnestness that carried the Puritans to New England, so the fresh infusion of religious life, brought by Whitfield, produced an ardent desire on the part of David Brainerd to devote himself to the remainder of the Indians; and in the year 1742, at twenty-five years old, he was examined by an assembly of ministers at Danbury, and licensed to preach the Gospel, when he began at once with a little settlement of Indians at Kent, with such a sinking of heart at his own unworthiness that he says he seemed to himself worse than any devil, and almost expected to have been stoned rather than listened to. Indeed, something of this diffidence and sadness seems always to have weighed him down when he began to preach, though the fervour of his subject and the responding faces of his audience always exhilarated him and bore him up through his sermon. To learn the Indian language had not occurred to him as part of his preparation, but probably these Kent Red men had been enough among the English to understand him, for they seem to have been much impressed.
A Scottish Society for propagating Christian Knowledge had arisen, and the delegates hearing of the zeal of David Brainerd, desired to engage him at a salary. The sense of his own unworthiness, and fear of keeping out a better man, brought his spirits down to the lowest ebb; nevertheless, he went to meet the representatives of the Society at New York, and there, though between the hubbub of the town and his own perpetual self-condemnation he was continually wretched, they were so well satisfied with him as to give him the appointment, on condition that he studied the language, intending to send him to the Red men between the Susquehanna and the Delaware; but there was a dispute between these and the Government, and it was decided to send him to a settlement called Kanaumeek, between Stockbridge and Albany.
Before going, David Brainerd, having no thought beyond devotion to the Indians, and thinking his allowance enough for his wants, gave up the whole of his inheritance to support a scholar at the University, and set forth, undaunted by such weakness of health as in ordinary eyes would have fitted him for nothing but to be carefully nursed; for even then he was continually suffering from pain and dizziness, and weakness so great that he could often hardly stand.
In this state he arrived at Kanaumeek, with a young Indian to act as his interpreter, and there spent the first night sleeping on a heap of straw. It was a lonely, melancholy spot, where the Indians were herded together, watched with jealous eyes by adventurers who were always endeavouring to seize their lands, and sadly degenerated from the free, grave, high-spirited men to whom Eliot had preached. His first lodging was in the log house of a poor Scotchman who lived among the Indians—a single chamber, without so much as a floor, and where he shared the family meals upon porridge, boiled corn, and girdle-cakes. The family spoke Gaelic, only the master of the house knowing any English, and that not so good as the Indian interpreter’s; and, moreover, the spot was a mile and a half from the Indian wigwams, no small consideration to so weakly a man, thus poorly fed. However, the Indians were pleased with his addresses, and seemed touched by them; but the evil habits of the White men were the terrible stumbling-block. Parties of them would come into the town, and vex the missionary’s ears with their foul tongues, making a scandalous contrast to the grave, calm manners of the Indians. More than ever did he love solitude, and when with his own hands he had built himself a log hut, where he could be alone when he pleased, his relief was great.
He was not the highly educated scholar and practical theorist that his predecessor had been: he seems to have had no plans or systems, and merely to have tried to fulfil immediate needs; but he soon found that he could not hope to benefit his Red flock without a school, so he made a journey to New Jersey to entreat for means to set one up, and this was done, with his interpreter as master. His journey was made on horseback, and was
